A veteran of the European sporting goods industry, Peter Mahrer, and Ralf Puschmann, a former colleague of his at Puma, are working on the establishment of an international distribution network for Hickies, a patented new lacing system that comes from the U.S. Designed to replace conventional laces and change each shoe into a slip-on, the elastic Hickies are being launched at Ispo after the sale of more than one million packs in 13 countries in the course of 2013, using a corner of the stand of the World Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry. They have set up a European subsidiary in Switzerland and a warehouse in Germany. Distributors have already been appointed for Italy and Spain, and agents for France and the U.K.  Mahrer was most recently the European president of Under Armour.

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